Fullscreen capture stuttering and flickering, despite capturing at 60fps

Z

Zkyo

New Member
Hi, I just realized that I'm having trouble recording with OBS. I'm not sure when this started as I don't record often, but I did not see any stuttering in my last recorded video in June. My recording scenes are for my left monitor @1920x1080 60fps, right monitor @1920x1080 60fps, and both monitors @ 1920x2160. All three of these settings capture Windows flawlessly, but capture a pretty bad stuttering and flickering of all fullscreen games. It looks perfectly smooth on my monitor, but clearly isn't in the recording.

Here's a sample video. I spun my cursor constantly to show that it was capturing Windows at 60fps, then showed Task Manager and OBS stats immediately after closing Dark Souls.

- YouTube

Enjoy the videos and music you love, upload original content, and share it all with friends, family, and the world on YouTube.
www.youtube.com www.youtube.com

My computer should be more than capable of recording smoothly. Nvidia GTX 970, AMD Ryzen 9 3900X, and 32 GB RAM. This summer, I had no issues recording and streaming various games much more demanding than Dark Souls's main menu, IE Farming Simulator 22, Microsoft Flight Simulator, and Doom Eternal. I have no idea what would have changed, aside from Windows or driver updates.

As for fixes I've tried, none of these seem to make any difference:
- Enabling/Disabling Windows game mode (was enabled)
- Running OBS in Admin mode
- Playing with OBS File>Settings>Output settings. Encoder is set to Hardware (NVENC, H.264), Encoder Preset is set to Quality
- Deleting and re-creating scenes

Previous Log: https://obsproject.com/logs/obJ4F3T-0XNisIgB
Current Log: https://obsproject.com/logs/Z-bVqSic6Rjh11jy
 
FranckB

FranckB

Member
try in simple and not advanced mode, to see if the problem persists
update drivers and windows
and finally capture in 30fps (even if for games it's better in 60)
OBS 28 must require more resources, and integrates the latest frameworks, APIs... so ask that we update our system as much as possible.
 
Z

Zkyo

New Member
As far as I can tell, I've updated everything, and the issue persists. Windows 10 home 22H2 build 19045.2251, settings applet says everything is updated w/ no optional updates. Though I did find out that apparently GeForce Experience's driver updating was broken for some reason, as my video driver was about 8 months out of date, and it kept failing to download the latest version. I updated it manually (GTX 970, Game Ready Driver v526.47), no difference. I'm not sure what other out of date drivers might cause problems.

I tried capturing at 30fps, no difference aside from the video file being at 30 fps as you'd expect. Dark Souls still appears to record at ~2 fps despite running at 30+. I did try recording quite a few other games, and realized that not every game does this. I'm still not sure why, but 10+ year old games seem to have poor captured framerate and sometimes flickering, 5-10 years has a smooth framerate with flickering, and <5 years records perfectly fine. Maybe it's related to which version of DirectX the game uses? In Euro Truck, only some elements are flickering, and again only in the recording.

I recorded a few more videos to show this. These are all one solid recording of three games on my right monitor (left actually, I labeled it right in OBS then swapped the monitor order a while back). Dark souls has flickering & poor framerate, Euro Truck has just flickering, and Doom Eternal is fine. One clip is at 30fps, the other at 60fps, and a third recorded from my phone to try and show that the framerate is only choppy in OBS.

30FPS - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xX9z9Gl8dQ4
60FPS - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qLH6elB8Hps
Phone Recording - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wHvzYUPrJrQ
 
FranckB

FranckB

Member
we can never stress enough that video capture (OBS or other) is a very greedy activity (GPU or CPU encoder), and video games even more so! the two combined at high levels (resolution, fps, multiple screens!) and well the graphics card is overstretched...

It is very likely that you are asking too much of your graphics card, which is 6 years old?
Recent games must already ask a lot of him, and OBS also asks a lot of him...

If you try to capture something other than a game, but movement, what happens?
We see your office which is already not terrible (the capture)
Otherwise go back to simple settings with the hardware encoder H.264 or HEVC (265) if present
 
Z

Zkyo

New Member
You do have a good point, I checked again with the performance monitor running. While recording gameplay, it is too much for my graphics card to handle, as the 3D section is frequently maxed out. I'll consider upgrading my card soon, hopefully the prices drop a bit more. I'm thinking maybe an RTX 3060 TI.

I'm not sure what you mean by capturing movement, so I recorded both of my monitors in this clip. I played a movie, that ufo framerate test, OBS window, and the performance monitor on the right. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WHFQ9wH4KYw

Although Euro Truck and Doom had tons of skipped frames in the recording, they both looked like a solid 60 fps at least on my monitor. I'm guessing rendering the game just takes priority over the recording. I never saw a hint of performance issues in the games, so I assumed the card was fine. My bad, I should have realized that sooner. Normally if my computer is struggling with something, it affects the entire system.

But I'm still not quite convinced that's the only issue here. In this recording, my GPU was not maxed out while recording the Dark Souls and Euro Truck main menus, and I was still having the same flickering and framerate issues. This only happened in Fullscreen mode, and went away when I switched both games to windowed (shown in the video linked above). Windowed Euro Truck had some skipped frames, but the flickering stopped. This flickering doesn't occur if i use a game or window capture as a source in OBS, rather than a display capture.

Display capture + fullscreen mode + specific games seems to cause these problems. I've been using OBS to record a 10 second clip of every game's main menu in my Steam library for a frontend. I just rewatched all the videos I recorded so far. Euro Truck, Frostpunk, Deus Ex Human Revolution, Dead Space 2, and Darksiders (original only, not remastered) have the flickering issue. The other 80 or so videos are either fine, or have complex menus & skipped frames likely from the GPU being overworked. But that flickering really doesn't seem like a performance issue to me. It's like OBS just briefly doesn't see the topmost layer of the game. It's always the user interface or splash image disappearing, showing the layer behind. It's most noticable in Frostpunk, where there seems to be three layers of images fighting. Maybe there's something these games have in common, and it's conflicting with OBS.
 
Last edited:
FranckB

FranckB

Member
so I think it's the "game capture" source that is malfunctioning? source "screenshot" works fine.

A question, what is this software:
20221110_193558_ima004.png
 
Z

Zkyo

New Member
I think it's "Display" that isn't working right, the one that captures your entire monitor. "Game Capture" seems to work fine on my computer. I don't know about screenshot, I haven't used it.

The tool is Test UFO, I use it to check a monitor's refresh rate.
 
Z

Zkyo

New Member
So, it seems you were onto something, thank you! It turns out that I did have an outdated driver, but not something I would have expected to be an issue. Razer Synapse, the driver for my mouse, was out of date and caused a massive hit on my computer's performance for some reason. Updating it also fixed some audio issues I was having (I thought it was unrelated; videos would have garbled audio for the first couple seconds.). In doom eternal, I went from capturing a video at <1 FPS up to ~30 FPS, dropping a bit during action. I do need to update my graphics card eventually, but it's still good enough for my needs.

Even with this new performance boost, I am still having the same flickering issues in other games. I still think there's another conflict somewhere.

New video, after updating mouse driver: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nv9db0FQbEk
 
FranckB

FranckB

Member
This is already progress.
Keep checking all the drivers for your machine!

For the flickers (I saw on your video) I think there is a conflict between the very high FPS of the games and the FPS of OBS, I think we are reaching the limits of your hardware; the high FPS of the game is too high for OBS to make an image from the stream: OBS captures several frames to make a nonconforming image = flicker. That's how I understand things - I could be wrong! -
 
koala

koala

Active Member
If you single step through the video frame by frame and reach a frame that creates the flickering, you see the upper half of the captured video is black, while the lower half is ok. This can be seen in the preview as well as in the screen capture itself, with a few frames delay, so this appears to happen within the capture itself, not later within the processing pipeline, i. e. encoding is not the cause. It's something system related. Drivers, bad hardware or such.

You single step through a video with the Youtube player by using the . key (dot).
 
Z

Zkyo

New Member
Finally found that bad driver, it was one for my motherboard (ROG Strix B550-F Gaming Wifi). Updating their Armory Crate utility appears to have fixed all of my recording issues. Every game I'd seen flickering or poor framerates in captures perfectly now. Thank you again!
 
koala

koala

Active Member
To avoid such issues, I try to avoid installing all those shiny bloatware that comes with modern gaming gadgets. I install the minimium amount of drivers and accompanying software required to drive all existing hardware (every device in device manager has a driver), but not more. Gadgets that look nice and shiny at first glance but don't actually have a value and I don't actually use in the long run get all uninstalled.

If the games I play works without it, I uninstall it.
 
Z

Zkyo

New Member
Looks like I spoke too soon. It WAS recording perfectly last night, and now the choppiness and flickering is back in certain games. I honestly have no idea what could have happened in that time period. Shortly after writing that post, I went to bed (my computer idling overnight, not in sleep mode), and now it's back. I already deleted the video files, but I am positive that they had captured perfectly last night. I recorded dark souls, euro truck, darksiders, deus ex, and frostpunk, not a hint of lag or flickering.

Also, all these games have the same issue too:
-Lego The Hobbit
-Just Cause
-Jet Grind Radio
-Metro 2033 (Intro video only)
-Shadow of Mordor
-Mirror's Edge
-Okami HD
-Outlast
-Payday
-Portal
-Tomb Raider Anniversary

As for the driver bloatware, I typically remove it too, with a couple exceptions. Geforce experience since I use it for game streaming, and Razer Synapse for mouse rebinding and macros. I only installed armory crate to see if it had an easy method for updating the motherboard drivers (it did).
 
Z

Zkyo

New Member
I just noticed the Lego Hobbit flicker effect is really strange. The font and logo flicker, but there's also an image that briefly appears. You can see it by pausing the video and using frame skip. It's hard to tell, but I think it's showing an inverted, partially rendered version of the room if you're looking up from under the ground. It moves with the camera too. Just like everything else, it's only visible on the OBS preview and recorded video file.

- YouTube

Enjoy the videos and music you love, upload original content, and share it all with friends, family, and the world on YouTube.
www.youtube.com www.youtube.com
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Top